Sunday, 6 April 2014

Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA on X1000

Today I want to take a look at the recently released Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA for AmigaOS4 on the AmigaOne X1000.

You can download Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA from Cherry Darling's website here. It is free to download.

The Cherry Darling developers were also responsible for the 2014 game release Ace of Hearts, which I took a look at here.

I should stress that this game only works if you have the dual graphic card setup installed on your AmigaOne X1000 using a Radeon 9250. You cannot use the Wazp3D software emulation to run it. If you do not have this Dual card setup which enables Warp3D, you cannot run this game. I covered how to set this dual graphics card setup in my previous blog entry here.

Amazing Voxel Bird Saga is an enhanced Flappy Bird clone (the famous iPhone game if you don't know what Flappy Bird is).

The game uses an interesting concept of a Voxel 3D landscape and some gameplay tweaks to extend the original Flappy Bird game concept and make the game quite fun and playable.

Once downloaded and extracted where you want it, you get a folder like this:

The Readme.txt explains this game is a BETA and runs a bit slowly on AmigaOS4 due to the graphics drivers.

Also note that we need to turn on a fix for 16 bit screen mode as I run a 16bit screen mode on the Radeon 9250 screen for better performance. This fix is applied via an option on the AmigaOS4 icon to launch the game - just remove the brackets around the options as shown below and click on Save:

Once the game launches, it launches in a window, which can be changed to full screen in the Options area on the Main game title screen:

Here is the Options menu where you can adjust Full screen/window mode, music/sound volume, difficulty level and sign into Cherry Darlings online highscore table to post your high scores online!

The music is a wonderful retro Amiga style tune, which I quite enjoyed listening to and works well with the game.

Upon starting the game itself, you are reminded of any achievements you have earned (and there are many achievements to unlock), and a hand reminding you to click on your mouse to start. And just keep clicking and clicking...

Basically you click periodically to keep the bird in flight, otherwise the bird will fall and crash into the ground. Unlike Flappy Bird you have a health bar, which means you sustain damage when you hit the ground or other objects, and it is game over when your health bar disappears.

You fly through coins for more score...you need to fly through the centre of the coins to collect the coin.

Game over in this game comes quickly, and often. The frustration of keeping the bird going for longer to get a better score is what keeps you coming back for another go:

Here is the high score table - you can switch between local and online high score, and use click and hold with scrolling to scroll through the list:

Here is some more in game screenshots:

If you fly through the flowers in the landscape you get some health back, and hitting bombs destroys a section of terrain and provides points for the coins distorted in the blast:

Here are the achievements you can unlock during the game - I still have a few to go!

I have uploaded a YouTube video to show the gameplay a bit better, showing both window mode and full screen. I did my best ever score in the full screen mode part of the video! Sorry but the camera angle is a bit crooked and I didn't realise until after I did it - I have very little chance of repeating that good run again so it remains like this. You may also need to turn the volume up a bit as I recorded the video on an iPhone:

I have to say that Amazing Voxel Bird Saga is a great game. Very addictive, graphics and sound are great (although there are some drawing errors at the bottom of the screen occasionally), and the game play can't be faulted. The online high score facility is also welcome.

The extra parts of the gameplay above the standard Flappy Bird clone fare makes this game a lot more engaging and fun to play.

This is a highly recommended game (even in BETA form) for X1000 owners, especially considering it is free! But please ensure you have the dual graphics set up with Radeon 9250 first, in order to be able to play it.